Stars of Charon (Legacy of the Thar'esh Book 1)

by Sam Coulson

“All’s quiet, I guess all the worry was for nothing,” Ju-lin smiled as we moved toward the final flux point. “Maybe we’ve been overreacting about all of this anyway. We’ll explain it all to dad. He’ll either figure out how to evacuate or see if we can get MineWorks to provide a defense force. Either way, he’ll know what to do.”

  She didn’t turn back to look at me, so I didn’t have to force a reassuring look. Maybe Loid was wrong about the Collegiate. Maybe Alume didn’t have the power he implied. Maybe we were would slip back into the system and land on the colony without incident. But try as I might, I couldn’t quite convince myself. I took a deep breath and prepared for the worst.

  Tons-o-Fun’s core rumbled to life as Ju-lin activated the jump drive. She let go of the controls and leaned back into her seat as the ship’s computer followed the pre-programmed path through the void. We were silent as the seconds passed. For once the swirling disorientation of the void didn’t bother me. I was too intently focused on what we would find on the other end of the flux.

  We returned to normal space with a jarring suddenness. The black of open space surrounded. For a half of a second, everything was quiet and calm. I was just starting to let out my breath when my console began to flash. A half-second later two different alarms sounded.

  “What the hell is that?” Ju-lin said as she took the controls.

  Before I could respond the Tons shook violently.

  “It’s a proximity alarm,” as I said it the alarms silenced. “Wait, no, not anymore.”

  “What do you mean not anymore?” Ju-lin asked as she engaged the engines as she searched her display.

  “I mean it gave a proximity alarm, but now it’s gone,” I said. “It looks like something hit us, the hull wasn’t breached. Systems are showing green. Maybe whoever it was shot us and fluxed out behind us?”

  “Only one way to find out,” Ju-lin said as she jammed the controls violently, engaging the thrusters to turn us around 180 degrees.

  Looking back in our wake we could see a cluster of debris. Two larger pieces drifted nearby. One looked like an engine, the other large segment was a smooth, angular line of a hull.

  “Oh hell,” Ju-lin sighed.

  “Whatever it was,” I said slowly. “It didn’t make it to the flux point.”

  “We must have jumped in right on top of him,” she said. “Poor bastard never had a chance.”

  “Not much left of it,” I said. “The scanners can’t identify it, but it was small.”

  “I can,” Ju-lin said. “See what’s left of the fuselage there, there is only one race in the verse that builds a ship with lines like that.”

  “Celestrial,” I sighed. “Do you think he just got here? That’s a little ship to be all alone out here—oh.”

  “What?” She craned her neck back to look at me.

  A loss for words, I continued looking out the viewport to the lights in the distance.

  She turned back forward, following my gaze and froze.

  “Look at them all,” her voice was barely more than a whisper.

  Eridani III was an easily recognizable speck in the distance, but between us and the colony was what looked like a massive grey and silver thunderhead complete with splintered flashes of lightning and flashing explosions.

  “S-scanning,” I managed to pry my eyes away and look down at my console. “Ships, a lot of ships. The computer is reading between 150 and 300. The numbers keep adjusting as more ships appear. All sizes, looks like Celestrial. Wait, no, Celestrial and Draugari.”

  “Draugari?” Ju-lin repeated as she engaged the thrusters to full, sending is barreling toward the raging battle. “Any Earthborn ships? What the hell is going on?”

  “The computer is reading all signals as alien. Some Earthborn ships, but no Protectorate transponders, probably pirated Draugari vessels. I don’t know, but it looks like the Draugari are deployed between the Collegiate and the colony.”

  “Are you sure?” She asked as she pulled up the long-range scans. “They are. Maybe the Draugari haven’t had a chance to raid it yet.”

  “They are defending it,” I said.

  “The Draugari are defending the colony?” She asked hotly. “You sound certain.”

  “I am,” I said simply.

  Once again Ju-lin spared a glance over her shoulder. She held my eyes for a moment before turning back to the controls. She turned back and spent a long moment studying the fleets. At last she took a long and measured breath.

  “See if you can plot a path that will take us around the bulk of the fighting. There,” she said. “See the debris and burnt out ships? It looks like the battle is moving over there to the left. That’s the thing about space battles, they have to shift away from the debris. If we head into where all the wreckage is floating we should have some cover. We need to make it down to the colony. They will be focused on each other so we should have a chance to slip through on the fringe. And keep your eyes out for a rear-guard. Fleets tend to leave a scout behind to make sure they don’t get outflanked.”

  “Well we’re lucky there, I think we already ran over him,” I said.

  “Good point,” Ju-lin replied. “At least he didn’t have time to get a signal out. Hopefully that’s not all of our luck today. We’ll need all we can get.”

  “Alright, now steady on, there is a large wreck of something at about your three o’clock low. Can you make it down there?”

  “There’s some debris but I should be able to,” Ju-lin answered as she fired the thrusters, sending us spiraling downward to narrowly avoid the broken wing of a Draugari Slire. The big wreck, it looks like some sort of old retrofitted hauler. Protectorate, but very old by the lines. I wonder how long the Draugari had been limping that thing along.”

  “Got a live one up ahead,” I said as my hand went to the weapons controls. “A damaged Celestrial.”

  “He’s powering weapons,” Ju-lin answered. “I have to give him credit, he’s not giving up. Without our transponder going he probably just thinks we’re another Draugari.”

  “Hold steady, I have him.”

  I worked the controls to line up the targeting reticule over the ship. It was one of the small Celestrial fighters, there were black scars along the hull and it looked like one of its twin engines had gone dark. He was working his thrusters to bring his guns around. The ship’s rocket launcher rotated as it prepared to fire.

  I pulled the trigger. With the shields already down there was nothing to protect the little fighter from the blast of the Tons’ mass driver cannon. The ship dissolved into dust. As soon as it hit, Ju-lin swung us hard to port and punched the thrusters and angled us toward the hauler’s wreck.

  Ju-lin had been right about disengaging the transponder. She had explained that in large fleet actions all ships make sure to have their fleet transponders on so that they can easily tell friend from foe. The commanders require it so that they can keep a clean and accurate view of the battle. It’s incredibly useful to make sure you don’t accidentally wander too far from friendly guns. For us, it served as a kind of cloaking device. With the Collegiate and Draugari focused on watching their scopes to track enemy ships, they weren’t looking out for untagged vessels. As Ju-lin had said, “without the transponder, the computer can’t tell the difference between us and the other lumps of burning wreckage.”

  Although Loid would have strongly objected to her referring to Tons-o-Fun as “wreckage,” I was reasonably certain he would have appreciated the tactic. I felt a pang of guilt. Somewhere he was being held prisoner, tortured, or even dead. Though, granted, I thought to myself as Ju-lin adjusted our course to avoid what looked like the body of a dead Draugari floating listlessly in the debris field, Loid may have it better off than we do right now anyway I thought.

  “Can you tell how the battle is going?” Ju-lin asked as we came alongside the wreck of the hauler. There were blast marks and occasional bursts of flame as the last pockets of air fed the dying fire. I could see makeshift gunnery seats ri
gged along the bulkhead. Most of them were shattered with the now-dead Draugari still at their guns. I pushed the rising wave of memories down and focused on the task at hand.

  The Draugari had significantly more firepower, but the Celestrials were well equipped and better coordinated. Though most of the wreckage we had seen were Draugari, we saw the remains of nearly a dozen or Celestrial fighters. I had seen four-pointed star of Vasudeva on the wings of two of them. Most of the Celestrial ships were single-man fighters, though there were a number of larger bombers and several larger corvette-class vessels that the computer couldn’t identify still in the fight.

  “From the wreckage I’d say that the Draugari took a beating on the first clash,” I answered. “They pulled back and are being more defensive now. The Celestrials don’t have a lot whole lot of firepower, but they have numbers and they seem to be a lot better organized.”

  “Sounds about right,” Ju-lin responded. “The Draugari normally use hit and run tactics, I’ve never heard of them standing their ground. They are migrants, they never have any territory to defend. It’s just weird.”

  “It is,” I said quietly.

  “What are you thinking?” She asked. “You sounded like that before.”

  “Nothing. Well,” I paused. “Nothing I can make sense of. Lor’ten, the Draugari I killed. I know he was sent here to watch the world. There is something they want to protect. I just wish he had known what it was.”

  “Because if he would have known you would know?”

  “More or less,” I answered.

  Ju-lin said something under her breath.

  I let it pass, if she was uncomfortable with the idea I couldn’t blame her. Having to sift through other people’s memories made me plenty uncomfortable.

  “I take that back,” I said as I studied the scanner display, we were close enough now that the scanners were able to identify more of the vessels. “The larger ships in the rear of the Collegiate fleet aren’t corvettes. They aren’t even combat vessels, they are haulers. I have a good look at one right now, it’s reading as a terraforming vessel, computer shows six of them, each carrying ten atmo field generators attached externally.”

  “Atmo field generators?” she echoed. “That fleet has sixty atmo generators?”

  “Yeah, computer says that they are used in the terraforming process to develop hospitable atmospheric conditions for colonization,” I read. “They are capable of processing native gasses to produce a wide variety of necessary atmospheric elements, including nitrogen, oxygen, and greenhouse gasses.”

  “I have to give the Skins points for creativity,” Ju-lin sighed. “Celestrials are the masters of Terraforming. Usually they only need ten of those things to replace a planet’s atmosphere. But if they just drop them all and fire them up spewing greenhouse gasses-”

  “They will cloud over the planet and either freeze or burn out the surface.”

  “It would be inhospitable within a week,” Ju-lin added. “If they overload the atmosphere they would turn the surface into a wasteland, super-storms would cover the world. Anyone down there would die, and anything down there would be wiped out or irrecoverable.”

  We continued flying along in silence as we paced along the wrecked hull of the hauler. By navigating the debris field, we had managed to bypass most of the fighting. I looked up and watched as the Draugari and Celestrial fleets shifted in formations. There were sporadic flashes of light as they occasionally exchanged fire. The initial clash was over, both sides were regrouping and strategizing their next move.

  The Draugari fleet clustered defensively around four large vessels, most looked like converted haulers like the wreck we were passing. Each would be crewed by dozens of Draugari warriors. Honor, strength, honor, strength. I remembered chanting the words in my mind, over and over as I waited on the edge of battle. No, I hadn’t. Lor’ten had. It wasn’t me. I looked down at my hands resting comfortably on the Tons’ weapon controls. No, I realized, it was me. Lor’ten was a trained gunner, so I was a trained gunner. His thoughts, his skills, his memories. They were my own. They were my skills, my memories. I shivered involuntarily as I struggled with the thought.

  “It’s just a matter of time,” Ju-lin said. “See how the Skins are spreading out and slowly surrounding them? Even though the Draugari have the advantage in firepower they are tightening up formation as if they are just waiting to be slaughtered. Dad always said, when you give up initiative, you give up the battle.”

  “The Draugari won’t stay in formation,” I said. “Not for long. They don’t like inaction. They will attack.”

  “Yeah, probably.” Ju-lin replied. “And when they do the Skins will be in position to wipe them out them. They’ve lost, they just don’t know it yet.”

  We finally slipped past the bow of the wreck, Eridani III loomed clearly in front of us. With the Collegiate and Draugari fleets still engaged, we had a straight shot in. Ju-lin fired the thrusters.

  Chapter 30

  “There,” I said softly. “Send the signal, have the Slires stay on us close, focus fire a missile on the lead fighter.”

  Kal leveled out the ship as we continued to follow the signal of the Celestrial fighters. We’d managed to keep our energy signatures hidden as we followed them, now that they were within the planet’s lower atmosphere, we were moving to strike.

  “There’s something down there,” Jen’tek interrupted. “A colony.”

  “A colony? Out here?” Tren asked.

  “Human,” Jen’tek said. “The Celestrial are bombing it.”

  “Surface rats bombing surface rats?” I repeated. “Good, they are distracted. Focus on the fighters first, then we will deal with the humans.”

  Jen’tek made a low growl, showing his approval.

  I charged the Carrack’s weapon systems as we came in range. The Slires were keeping tight on our wing, waiting for my signal to attack. Clouds filled the viewscreen as we continued our descent, my finger hovered above the trigger as I waited for the shot.

  At last, the clouds cleared and I saw the ships. Three of them were flying in loose formation. Smoke was already beginning to rise from the burning settlement in the distance. I took careful aim and fired.

  The missile fired, trailing cleanly across the night sky. The lead enemy disintegrated in a ball of fire. First blood. The Slires rushed passed us, driving hard toward the two remaining fighters.

  “I have three marks coming in fast. Slires. Coming in along the horizon,” I called as I read the scope. It had been quiet for the last thirty minutes since we had cleared the battlefield and set our course for the planet, if either of the fleets had noticed our passing, they were too intent on each other to worry about us.

  “I see them,” Ju-lin answered.

  “Looks like the Collegiate weren’t the only ones with a rear guard.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” she remarked as she studied the scopes. “Damn they’re fast. Hold on, I’m going to drive us down and break atmo. The entry will be rough, but if they want to follow us they will have to slow down or they will be torn apart when they hit the troposphere. It should give us a chance.”

  “As long as you promise that it will be smoother than the last time you tried to land on this planet,” I joked as I shifted power to the front shields.

  “No promises,” I saw the corner of her lip curl into a grin.

  With that she sent us into a steep dive toward the surface. The ship began to shake as we hit the upper atmosphere and Ju-lin reversed thrust to start slowing our descent. As we slipped through the horizon and into the world, she pulled up and began to level us out as the computer plotted a course to the Downs.

  The scopes were clear. I’d lost radar contact with the Slires when we passed the magnetosphere, but just because we couldn’t see them, didn’t mean they weren’t there. I kept my hands on the gunnery controls.

  “This is incoming vessel designation Tons-o-Fun,” Ju-lin thumbed on the radio. “Requesting landing rights out
side of the Downs, anyone out there?”

  The radio was silent as we listened to the steady hum of the engines.

  “This is Ju-lin McCullough, is anyone down there?”

  Again silence.

  “Maybe nobody’s near the coms station?” I suggested. “They may not even know there’s a battle going on up there.”

  “Possible,” Ju-lin answered. “But Dad always has someone assigned to monitoring coms. Someone has to be there.”

  “Incoming vessel, this is the Downs. You have multiple hostile contacts closing in on you, break off your approach.”

  “Break off my approach?” Ju-lin snapped. “This is Ju-lin McCullough. Who is this? Darin? Jace? Get my father, now.”

  “Your father is indisposed,” the voice responded.

  “Indisposed? What the hell does that mean?”

  “The Slires are coming in at our six o’clock,” I said quietly. “We have maybe two minutes.”

  “It means he is not available to take your com,” the voice snapped back. “Break off your approach.”

  “My brother then. Marin McCullough, he always has his radio on him, route me to his personal comm.”

  “Marin McCullough is off-world,” the voice responded flatly. “This is your last warning, break off your approach. You are leading hostiles toward the colony.”

  “Off-world?” Ju-lin said breathlessly. “Where did Marin go? When did he leave? And who the hell is this?”

  Again, there was silence.

  “Ninety seconds until those Draugari are in range,” I said. “If we let them get in behind us we won’t be able to shake them.”

  “I know,” Ju-lin snapped back as she worked the controls.

  “Their shields aren’t modulated for atmospheric combat, they will be operating at maybe sixty-present strength,” I added.

  “Really, that’s good to know,” she responded. “I’m going to bring us around, open up on them full bore, our shields should hold for one good pass, maybe we can even up the odds.”

  “Ju-lin! I’m so sorry about that,” a new voice broke in over the coms. “This is Governor Hollace Growd, we met back on the colony ship.”